Keeping track of decisions across years
“What have we actually decided about this?” is everyday business in committee work – and answering it regularly costs more time than the preparation itself. An assistant working on your own minutes and papers finds the state of decisions across years and committees, naming the meeting, date and agenda item for every statement.
What this is about
Decisions rarely happen in a single meeting. A topic travels through the specialist committee, the main committee and the council, gets deferred, amended, adopted with conditions and called up again years later. The trail sits in minutes of different committees, in papers, motions and records – formally complete, but in practice findable only by someone who knows the history.
Two situations feel this hardest: preparing a meeting where a topic is called up again, and monitoring implementation, where it has to be established what became of earlier instructions to the administration. Both are legwork nobody enjoys and nobody can skip.
Which sources KOSMO connects to
What gets connected is the material of committee work, usually unchanged from the council information system or the filing:
- Records and minutes from council, main and specialist committees – including earlier electoral terms.
- Council papers from the administration including reasoning and annexes.
- Motions and enquiries from the political groups with the corresponding answers.
- Agendas and implementation-monitoring lists, as far as they exist as documents.
How it works
- Connect the material
The body of minutes is connected as a source. No re-sorting is needed – KOSMO works on the filing as it is and recognises the assignment to committee and meeting date from the documents.
- Query the state of decisions
Ask in ordinary language what has been decided on a topic so far. The answer names the committee, the meeting date and the agenda item – so the chain can be followed instead of reconstructed from memory.
- Prepare the meeting
Before a meeting you can compile what exists on the topic called up: earlier decisions, open instructions, motions from the groups and the reasoning of the current paper.
- Keep open items in view
For implementation monitoring you can search specifically for instructions to the administration that have no recorded response yet. Scheduled tasks can repeat this at fixed intervals instead of it being worked through once a year.
An example
Which decisions on the cycle path plan have been taken since 2023, and which instructions to the administration are still open?
From Minutes_BuildingCommittee_2023-09-12.pdf, item 4: the committee instructed the administration to submit a feasibility study for the northern section. In Minutes_Council_2024-03-07.pdf, item 11, the plan was adopted with amendments; on the northern section, reference was made to the study still outstanding. A later paper on this is not contained in the connected material.
Illustrative example. What KOSMO answers depends solely on the documents you connect – nothing is invented, and every statement carries its reference.
What does not happen
The documents do not leave your infrastructure. KOSMO runs on-premise or in our German data centre; there is no transfer to a cloud provider, no third-country question and no CLOUD Act caveat. No model is trained on your content either – it serves to answer your question, nothing more. Who may see which source is controlled through group permissions; anyone who may not open a document will not see it quoted in an answer.
Where the limit lies: KOSMO is not a council information system and replaces neither formal implementation monitoring nor the official record. It finds and evidences what is in the connected documents – no more. If minutes are missing from the material, they are missing from the answer too; KOSMO says so rather than papering over a gap. The legally binding version of a decision remains the official record.
Frequently asked questions
Does this replace our council information system?
No. The council information system remains the leading filing system and the binding source. KOSMO sits on top of it as a search that works in ordinary language and joins up across meetings and electoral terms what is filed there individually.
What about non-public parts of meetings?
Those can be kept as a separate source with tighter permissions. Anyone without access to the non-public part gets no answer from it and no hint of its content.
Does this work with older minutes as well?
Provided the text is machine-readable. Pure image scans have to go through text recognition first – which is the normal case for years predating digitisation and is clarified during the project.
Can KOSMO run implementation monitoring automatically?
It can regularly compile which instructions have no recorded response and report that. Judging whether an instruction is complete stays with the committee office – not least because it has to be documented.
See it on your own files
We will show you KOSMO on your own documents – without anything having to be uploaded that leaves your building.
